`Audition’, Take 2

It is WAY too early to get too excited about this (Restraints! Where are the restraints?!), but a cinematic adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s Tokyo serial killer novel In the Miso Soup has been cleared for take off, with Paris, Texas director Wim Wenders and Willem Dafoe attached.

Japan Extreme die-hards will recall that Takashi Miike’s breakout flick, Audition, also was based on the work of Murakami (which remains annoyingly untranslated into English to this day, damn it). Shooting on the $8 million film begins in February, according to Screen International.

Another Murakami adaptation, Coin Locker Babies starring Val Kilmer (I know, I know), Tadanobu Asano (Kakihara from Miike’s Ichi the Killer) and Asia Argento, is also supposed to be in production, with distribution being handled by Miramax. This story of two men who were abandoned as children in coin lockers at a Tokyo train station will be Asano’s first English-speaking role, according to this snippet from The Guardian newspaper.